Adoption officials said on Wednesday that DNA tests indicate a Guatemalan baby reported stolen from her mother was being adopted by a US couple, the first strong sign that the Central American nation's troubled adoption system relied in part on abducted children.
Authorities have long believed that children were stolen or bought to supply Guatemala’s US$100 million-a-year adoption industry before thousands of pending adoptions were frozen in May.
Previously, dozens of mothers reported stolen babies and at least two were found in orphanages, although they had not yet been put up for adoption.
But adoption officials showed on Wednesday that DNA tests identified toddler Esther Zulamita, who was reported stolen on March 26 last year. The girl was in the process of being adopted by an unidentified US couple.
Jaime Tecu, director of a team of experts reviewing all pending Guatemalan adoptions, said the DNA test results represent the first time officials have directly linked a baby reported stolen by its mother to the fraud plagued adoption system.
“This is the first time that we’ve been able to show, with irrefutable evidence, that a stolen child was put up for adoption,” Tecu said.
The baby’s mother, Ana Escobar, said armed men locked her in a storage closet at the family’s shoe store north of Guatemala City and took the six-month-old.
“When I got out, my daughter was gone,” she said in an earlier interview about the case.
She spent months searching hospitals and orphanages, looking for the child.
In May, Escobar said she was sitting in the National Adoption Council’s offices, hoping to get access to the babies whose adoption cases were being reviewed. She looked up and saw a toddler who looked like her baby.
The image of the child being carried by an official haunted her, and she asked officials to see more photos. Soon she was sure the baby girl was hers.
All of the girl’s papers were in order, including DNA tests showing that her birth mother was someone other than Escobar. But Escobar convinced officials to take new DNA tests.
“She was so sure that the child was hers that we agreed to search the house where the baby was kept,” Tecu said.
The baby was placed with a caretaker while her adoption was pending, but Escobar convinced a Guatemalan judge in May to let her care for the child while the new DNA tests were performed.
“I can’t explain how excited and happy I am,” Escobar said on Wednesday. “It’s a miracle.”
Tecu said officials would investigate the lawyers who handled the adoption, the doctor who signed the falsified DNA tests, and anyone else associated with the process.
“This was run by a mafia, and we [are] going after them,” he said.
Guatemala froze all 2,286 pending adoptions in May, and officials are reviewing each case to confirm there is no fraud.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS